Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:homicides now the highest in almost 20 years

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/12/31/2021-homicides-dc-rising/

I read through all of the 100+ comments on this POPVille post and 100% of the many people who said they left reported violence as either the #1 cause or one of the principal reasons for leaving.
https://www.popville.com/2021/12/big-population-loss-washington-dc-2021/

Coming to any sort of conclusion based on what Popville commenters are saying is hilarious. These are the same people who feel the need to call 911 when they see a Black person walking down their street.

If I understand correctly from this thread, Reddit commenters should be taken seriously but POPVille commenters shouldn’t? And this is how we know that official government data is inaccurate? Pretty wild.

It just goes to show that DCUM commenters shouldn't be taken seriously at all.

Absolutely.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You're forgetting that DC is a very young place. I know A LOT of young people who left DC to move back in with their parents during the pandemic. There was no reason for them to be there paying high rents when their jobs were virtual and everything was shut down. Some that I know of have come back.

Many, if not most, are never coming back.

As a young person, why would you choose DC where the public schools are abysmal and the entrenched local government dysfunctional?

Why?
1. Fantastic job opportunities, many only available here.
2. High pay.
3. Beautiful architecture
4. Bus & metro system + Zip + Lyft means you can get by without a car
5. Interest in US politics.
6. Two career couples both have lots of job opps in the DMV
7. DC TAG
8. One of America’s few walkable cities
9. Close to beaches, mountains, small towns, NYC
10. Need I go on?
Signed, I once crashed a Mayor Barry cocktail reception

DC isn't really close to any of those things. It's more in a dead zone.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You're forgetting that DC is a very young place. I know A LOT of young people who left DC to move back in with their parents during the pandemic. There was no reason for them to be there paying high rents when their jobs were virtual and everything was shut down. Some that I know of have come back.

Many, if not most, are never coming back.

As a young person, why would you choose DC where the public schools are abysmal and the entrenched local government dysfunctional?

Why?
1. Fantastic job opportunities, many only available here.
2. High pay.
3. Beautiful architecture
4. Bus & metro system + Zip + Lyft means you can get by without a car
5. Interest in US politics.
6. Two career couples both have lots of job opps in the DMV
7. DC TAG
8. One of America’s few walkable cities
9. Close to beaches, mountains, small towns, NYC
10. Need I go on?
Signed, I once crashed a Mayor Barry cocktail reception

People citing Metro as an asset to the city and expect to be taken seriously?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You're forgetting that DC is a very young place. I know A LOT of young people who left DC to move back in with their parents during the pandemic. There was no reason for them to be there paying high rents when their jobs were virtual and everything was shut down. Some that I know of have come back.

Many, if not most, are never coming back.

As a young person, why would you choose DC where the public schools are abysmal and the entrenched local government dysfunctional?

Why?
1. Fantastic job opportunities, many only available here.
2. High pay.
3. Beautiful architecture
4. Bus & metro system + Zip + Lyft means you can get by without a car
5. Interest in US politics.
6. Two career couples both have lots of job opps in the DMV
7. DC TAG
8. One of America’s few walkable cities
9. Close to beaches, mountains, small towns, NYC
10. Need I go on?
Signed, I once crashed a Mayor Barry cocktail reception

Anonymous wrote:How many of you lived in DC during the 70's and 80's? Places like Shaw, NOMA and U Street were persona non grata.

I moved here in the ‘80s when Glover Park and Mount Pleasant were full of what we called “group houses.” DC was always more expensive than the suburbs, but in hindsight it was a great value.

Statistical agency employee here again. I did a little more digging to see what other pieces of information we could get to understand what's actually going on. It seems like a number of people on here are more interested in rehashing their pet complaints than in understanding what's happening, but I'll share for anyone who's interested. If you think my post is too long and just want to complain, save your keystrokes; I don't care.

The Census Bureau also produces something called the CPS Housing Vacancy Supplement (HVS), which reports vacancy rates for owner-occupied and rental housing units for each quarter and for each state and metro. These are pretty noisy estimates, because the CPS only samples something like 72k households a month nationwide, which means each quarterly estimate for DC is based on only ~450 observations split between rentals and owned properties. The vacancy rate is also only an indirect measure of population change, since households can grow or shrink without becoming vacant, and since construction of new units changes the denominator over time. But, this survey provides much more timely data on what happened with population movements. It doesn't have the same issues of laggy data sources or of problematic proportionality assumptions as the intercensal population estimates (see my prior post). It does still have some caveats re: surveys conducted in a pandemic, similar to the concerns about representativeness in the decennial Census that forms the baseline for the intercensal population estimates.

What you can see for DC is that the DC vacancy rate for owner-occupied properties (houses and condos not intended for rental) is quite low and hasn't really changed much from 2018 to Q3 of 2021 (no Q4 data yet). There numbers bounce around a bit quarter to quarter, but if you average over the quarters of the year you get an average between 1.2% and 1.4% for each of the last four years. This is notably well below what the vacancy rates were back before 2015 and especially back before 2010 (often over 3%). So if homeowners with kids are moving to the suburbs, it's clear that new homeowners have continued to replace them.

Looking at rental vacancy rates is another story. Rental vacancy rate estimates are much noisier than homeowner vacancy rates (probably because renters and their landlords are harder to get survey responses from). But, the estimates for 2018 and 2019 suggest a baseline of between 6 and 8 percent rental vacancy, which is on the low end for DC by historical standards going back to 2005. The first two quarters of 2020 followed this same pattern (7.4% and 6.8%), but there was a big increase in rental vacancy starting in Q3 2020. It went to 8.7% and then 9.9% in 2020, and then to 10.5% and 11.0% in the first two quarters of 2021, before falling back considerably to 9.9% in Q3 2021. These are mostly within the margin of error of one another (which again, is very big because of the small sample), but taking them at face value suggests a big jump up that has started to retreat but still has quite a ways to fall to get back to where it was before the pandemic.

It's also worth mentioning that these trends don't show up if you look at DC metro level data or national data, only if you look at DC itself. This suggests that city renters left the city specifically, but renters didn't leave rentals more generally. However, since DC is the only city-state we have, it's really hard to know how DC compares to other cities in that regard. It would probably be possible for someone to recreate these statistics using the public CPS microdata for a few of the larger cities in the US, but it would be a project.

Overall, these data say a few things to me. First, as mentioned by myself and others, it looks like the vast majority of the movement has been among renters. The low vacancy rates and strong price appreciation for owned properties in DC doesn't provide any evidence to suggest a decline in demand for this type of living. Second, the big jump in 2020 Q3 and the big decline in 2021 Q3 suggest to me that a good chunk of this is in the form of lack of the usual young transplant pipeline. In other words, recent college grads moved home instead of moving here in summer 2020; in summer 2021 that was perhaps a little less true but still an issue. Going forward, we might expect any big shifts in population and vacancy to coincide with summer turnover and incoming new residents. Third, the issues I raised with lag in the intercensal population projections may not be as bad as I thought. Barring major sampling issues in 2020, it seems pretty clear that the peak of rental vacancy, and presumably of peak population loss, was in early 2021. Fourth, we still only have one quarter of data to evaluate the recovery, but it does seem to be substantially underway.

If you're actually interested in this topic, I'd suggest keeping an eye on the next few quarterly releases of these HVS data. By this time next year, I imagine that we will have a pretty good sense of how durable the rise in rental vacancies is, and we'll have much more price data as well. Q3 2022 will be a particularly interesting data point to see. I would still wait a couple of years before really leaning on the intercensal population estimates, given the issues that I've highlighted before.

Sources:
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/rates.html
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/methodology/index.html

Haha poster many people who went to their parents homes did not change their reporting state for tax purposes.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You're forgetting that DC is a very young place. I know A LOT of young people who left DC to move back in with their parents during the pandemic. There was no reason for them to be there paying high rents when their jobs were virtual and everything was shut down. Some that I know of have come back.

Many, if not most, are never coming back.

As a young person, why would you choose DC where the public schools are abysmal and the entrenched local government dysfunctional?

Because people in their 20s generally don't care about that? Not the ones in DC with graduate degrees who aren't planning on getting married and having kids for quite a while. I know a lot who have already come back.

Sorry buddy, but your personal anecdotes don’t trump the actual data. Your friend who have jobs and pay taxes are the easiest to track and 23,000 of them left the city. Whatever they may or may not care about, that cohort of people are gone.

In the last decade DC gained a net 88,000 people and in one year alone lost a net 20,000. You’re going to need a lot more friend anecdotes to make a significant dent in that.

They're not all friends. I don't have the numbers, so maybe you're right. But I personally know and know of a lot of people in their 20s who left DC during the pandemic. Some of them have come back--not all to DC proper. Some are in close in NOVA or MD. These were mostly people who rented and often with roommates.

It seems like younger families often leave DC when their kids get school age and definitely middle school age, so if you were virtual and had kids, it would make sense to go somewhere cheaper and with more space. Then add in all the political stuff. It's not shocking.

Then add in the people who weren't going to have to go back to in person jobs. It's not like this is surprising.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:homicides now the highest in almost 20 years

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/12/31/2021-homicides-dc-rising/

I read through all of the 100+ comments on this POPVille post and 100% of the many people who said they left reported violence as either the #1 cause or one of the principal reasons for leaving.
https://www.popville.com/2021/12/big-population-loss-washington-dc-2021/

Coming to any sort of conclusion based on what Popville commenters are saying is hilarious. These are the same people who feel the need to call 911 when they see a Black person walking down their street.

If I understand correctly from this thread, Reddit commenters should be taken seriously but POPVille commenters shouldn’t? And this is how we know that official government data is inaccurate? Pretty wild.

It just goes to show that DCUM commenters shouldn't be taken seriously at all.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:homicides now the highest in almost 20 years

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/12/31/2021-homicides-dc-rising/

I read through all of the 100+ comments on this POPVille post and 100% of the many people who said they left reported violence as either the #1 cause or one of the principal reasons for leaving.
https://www.popville.com/2021/12/big-population-loss-washington-dc-2021/

Coming to any sort of conclusion based on what Popville commenters are saying is hilarious. These are the same people who feel the need to call 911 when they see a Black person walking down their street.

If I understand correctly from this thread, Reddit commenters should be taken seriously but POPVille commenters shouldn’t? And this is how we know that official government data is inaccurate? Pretty wild.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You're forgetting that DC is a very young place. I know A LOT of young people who left DC to move back in with their parents during the pandemic. There was no reason for them to be there paying high rents when their jobs were virtual and everything was shut down. Some that I know of have come back.

Many, if not most, are never coming back.

As a young person, why would you choose DC where the public schools are abysmal and the entrenched local government dysfunctional?

Because people in their 20s generally don't care about that? Not the ones in DC with graduate degrees who aren't planning on getting married and having kids for quite a while. I know a lot who have already come back.

Sorry buddy, but your personal anecdotes don’t trump the actual data. Your friend who have jobs and pay taxes are the easiest to track and 23,000 of them left the city. Whatever they may or may not care about, that cohort of people are gone.

In the last decade DC gained a net 88,000 people and in one year alone lost a net 20,000. You’re going to need a lot more friend anecdotes to make a significant dent in that.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You're forgetting that DC is a very young place. I know A LOT of young people who left DC to move back in with their parents during the pandemic. There was no reason for them to be there paying high rents when their jobs were virtual and everything was shut down. Some that I know of have come back.

Many, if not most, are never coming back.

As a young person, why would you choose DC where the public schools are abysmal and the entrenched local government dysfunctional?

Because people in their 20s generally don't care about that? Not the ones in DC with graduate degrees who aren't planning on getting married and having kids for quite a while. I know a lot who have already come back.

Anonymous wrote:You're forgetting that DC is a very young place. I know A LOT of young people who left DC to move back in with their parents during the pandemic. There was no reason for them to be there paying high rents when their jobs were virtual and everything was shut down. Some that I know of have come back.

Many, if not most, are never coming back.

As a young person, why would you choose DC where the public schools are abysmal and the entrenched local government dysfunctional?

You're forgetting that DC is a very young place. I know A LOT of young people who left DC to move back in with their parents during the pandemic. There was no reason for them to be there paying high rents when their jobs were virtual and everything was shut down. Some that I know of have come back.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:homicides now the highest in almost 20 years

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/12/31/2021-homicides-dc-rising/

I read through all of the 100+ comments on this POPVille post and 100% of the many people who said they left reported violence as either the #1 cause or one of the principal reasons for leaving.
https://www.popville.com/2021/12/big-population-loss-washington-dc-2021/

Coming to any sort of conclusion based on what Popville commenters are saying is hilarious. These are the same people who feel the need to call 911 when they see a Black person walking down their street.

Imagine for a moment if that were true.

If it weren't true, Silverman wouldn't have had to turn off comments on all crime posts. But he couldn't stop his commenters from being racist -- honestly, he egged them on by posting nothing but MPD alerts as news stories -- so he had to shut them down.

Yet he didn’t post the story about a man hitting a father and his toddler with bricks. Why is this not on Popville and not national news?